The Mona Lisa
by Krysta Cardinale“Da Vinci’s Finest Work”
The Mona Lisa is without a doubt one of the greatest works in the history of western art, and also Leonardo Da Vinci’s finest piece of art. How many opinions have been voiced about it, how many times has it been reproduced, counterfeited and stolen in more than five centuries? There is however, a final truth waiting to be discovered, a certainty guarded within her smile like a hidden treasure. And the search, the mystery, will take us to the key to the Leonardo’s life. A life spent searching for unobtainable perfection. A life that in 1503 encapsulated the most wondrous ambitions possible to man, to fly, crossing the sky like a bird and an even stranger chimera, to create the perfect union of male and female within a single being.
The name Mona Lisa has reached the greatest heights in the history of art; her smile has inspired and educated artists throughout history, as well as immortalizing her creator, as a master of his art. And yet with one question we can unravel any certainty we might think we possess about this work. And our question is where is it now? It answer might seem obvious, hanging in the Louvre in Paris. But what if we were to say that this wasn’t true?
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was created between 1503 and 1505 in Florence. The Florentine merchant Francesco Del Giocondo commissioned the portrait of his third wife Lisa Gherardini, who was 20 years his junior. They had been married a few years earlier. For Leonardo this was not just another commission. Undertaking this portrait of Mona Lisa was for him, a riveting experience only rivaled by his desire to fly. An old yearning that in those years became an obsession.
Leonardo had never been as busy as he was while painting this work. During this period he was designing a canal for the river Rhone, as well as drawing a series of sketches depicting the Battle of Anghiari. As an artist he was renowned throughout Europe and was commissioned to do a great variety of work. He was at the peak of his career, the perfect age, the high point of genius and audacity. He felt he could take on any challenge.
Little by little his dream of flying and this enormously important portrait would become the focus of his life. Two projects that will become his greatest goals; on the one hand to see the world from above and discover the secrets of the birds, and on the other to paint a portrait containing symbols that encapsulate the very essence of a human being, symbols that transcend time and its limitations.
Leonardo Da Vinci made Mona Lisa in 1503, the same year when he was immersed in creating his fly machine. His obsession with flying tormented him. Each time he observed the fluttering of birds, he became more and more eager to imitate them, to rise up to the sky, to look down from there at the world was an image that had obsessed him since childhood.
He divided his time between his flying machines and Lisa’s sittings. At the time she was only 24-years-old, and Leonardo was over 50. To work with her, he happily interrupted his calculations about the winds and the density of air. The two had an instant rapport. Legend has it, that when the artist painted the young woman she’d just lost a child and was deeply unhappy, an ungraspable and distant sadness of the soul that the artist tried to capture and expressed on the canvas. It was one of the few times that he didn’t interrupt one of his projects to start another.
More down to earth, Lisa’s husband had hired musicians to gladden his wife’s days and entertain her while the artist was at work. And this was customary at the time to relieve the ennui of posing. Leonardo Da Vinci’s biographers have not been able to pinpoint why the artist became so obsessed with Lisa. However, there is speculation that that relationship changed the day she told him that was 24-years-old. For the workings of a mysterious alchemy, Lisa became the reincarnation of Aldeira, Leonardo’s adoptive mother. Coincidentally, Aldeira had passed away at 24, Lisa’s age at the time. Perhaps every time that Leonardo looked at Lisa he saw his mother. One thing was for certain, for some reason the artist could never be parted from that mysterious canvas, he would carry it with him till the end of his days.
Questioning about the History of the Mona Lisa
There was and is a maze of complex questions regarding the history of the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci himself, and the meaning behind the portrait. Some of the questions include, If this was a commissioned portrait why did Leonardo never give it to its rightful owner? Why did he keep it with him into the end of his days? There are dozens of theories, none of them completely satisfying.
Spellbound by the beauty of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, painters and biographers from Leonardo’s time produced copious notes and sketches. The most transcendent commentaries include word of Giorgio Vasari, contemporary biographer of Da Vinci and other renaissance painters. Three decades after Leonardo’s death, Vasari was the first person to call the painting, “Mona Lisa,” from, Madam Lisa. The famous biographer relates that when Da Vinci left Florence, he did not take the unfinished portrait with him to the Castle of Cloux in France where he ended his days. But Antonio de Beatis, who visited Leonardo in Cloux in 1517, unambiguously states in his travel diary, that the artist had three pieces with him in his final days, John the Baptist, St. Anne, and the portrait of a mysterious Florentine lady. It has also been documented that Leonardo sold a portrait, which de Beatis mentions in his travel diary for four thousand crowns. The painting was sold to Leonardo’s protector, Francis I King of France. That is the painting that hangs today in the Louvre.
There are two clearly contradictory accounts, a controversy that no one has been able to clear up. Did Leonardo take “The Mona Lisa” with him to France, or did he leave it unfinished here in Florence? Perhaps both things occurred, and this is where a single enigma becomes two. Could there be two pieces with the same name, one lost and the other in the Louvre? Which of the two is the real Mona Lisa? Let’s take a closer look. The description of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in Vasari’s biography contains specific features that do not coincide with the painting in the Louvre. Indeed there is a tiny detail that becomes quite clear evidence, Mona Lisa’s eyebrows. The biography praises the natural way, Mona Lisa’s eyebrows emerge from her skin in perfect harmony in her every pore. The same account mentions a powerful stare extenuated by her eyelashes, which is to say that her eyebrows and eyelashes are crucial to the portrait’s realism. Let’s take a look at the painting. Where are the eyebrows in the famous version in the Louvre?
The painting in the Louvre has neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. To explain this, some critics have tried to argue that they were erased due to poor conservation over the centuries.
It is true that several layers of varnish were applied to the painting to protect it, and that it is somewhat faded. It is also true that acid was hurled on it in 1956, but only the lower half of the painting was damaged. It is also a fact that radiological studies performed by the Louvre have determined that the painting in question has been conserved extremely well and that they were never eyebrows or eyelashes.
The evidence becomes conclusive; two pieces with the same name with very different destinies. On the one hand, there is faithful portrait of the young Mona Lisa also known as Giocondo, wife of Giocondo. This unfinished portrait of a young lady with eyebrows and eyelashes stayed in Florence. On the other hand, there is a second painting, the famous work of a subject with no facial hair, considered one of the greatest pieces of art in history. The one that Leonardo preferred, and gazed on in his final days. Two paintings, one unfinished and destined for oblivion, the other, finished and hanging in the Louvre.
There is a striking sketch by the great painter Raphael De Sanzio, which proves the theory of the two portraits. Raphael visited Leonardo’s studio in Florence when he was painting the “Mona Lisa”. Amazed by the work, he created an identical sketch. There are two differences between this drawing, which is also at the Louvre, and Leonardo’s famous portrait. First, the two columns that rise up to the sides of the figure. The absence of his columns in Leonardo’s work could be explained by the fact that the painting was presumably trimmed down in later centuries until it reached its current dimensions 53 by 77cms. The second difference however is more striking; the woman in Raphael’s sketch has well defined eyebrows.
Two paintings, one in the Louvre, the other missing, two players in the game of likeness and difference, each claiming to be the real one. If the whereabouts of the original painting inspired by Lisa, and described so often by Leonardo’s contemporaries is unknown, then who is in the famous portrait hanging the Louvre, and why has her identify been kept secret for so many years? These questions emerge from the depths of speculation and rise up to help us decipher this incredible painting that looks at us impassively from the walls of the museum. How many of Leonardo’s secrets will she reveal?
Leonardo, Mona Lisa Conclusions
We will never know if Leonardo was able to realize his dream and fly. But in his work he most certainly discovered a flying machine that did indeed take flight. His work had soared through time and human imaginations and become a part of our universal heritage. Thus, with this self-portrait Leonardo did what no one else was able to, he secretly transcended with a universally famous image that still leaves us with the uneasy feeling, we have not understood everything.
At the age of 50, Leonardo had lived what might have taken others several lifetimes to experience; military engineer, architect, lively host, forensic scientist, traveler. Imagining life requires thankless, but necessary definitions because from Leonardo, one might expect any experience filled with achievement. As we have proven, the deepest esoteric mysteries echoes in his art, yet he kept very few pieces. Giocondo was certainly one of them. Perhaps his ideas of about reincarnation and his admiration of Buddhism are also in his work. Anything is possible when it comes to Leonardo. His imagination knew no bounds and Giocondo was perhaps his greatest achievement.
The Giocondo here in the Louvre, encapsulates Leonardo’s dream, the perfection of his existence. An image in front of him on the canvas and one of the unfinished works, discover the compliment that he was missing. But what could have happened to the portrait of Lisa?
Due to the number of activities and commissions he had taken on in those years, Lisa told him she did not think he would finish her portrait. Unfazed, Leonardo defended it. For him, the painting would rest on his mathematical work and he was certain that would finish it. However, months went by and Leonardo did not complete the painting. Lisa would repeat time and again but the painter would never finish it.
Lisa was right, Leonardo never finished the work and it was left lost in some corner of Europe. Perhaps the annoyed client decided to take it as it was, and it ended up being devoured by time in the corner of some palace. However, the portrait that is on display in the Louvre, “The Giocondo”, the smiling woman, is perfect and finished. We simply have to assume that it is not the portrait of Lisa. There were two parallel paintings, one that was lost and the other that expresses the soul of its creator, his spiritual synthesis. Today five centuries later that painting hangs in the famous museum.
